Grand and Grandiose Titles

I recently finished Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and didn't like it as much as all the hype led me to believe I would. It certainly made the recent n+1 article about hype feel relevant. From the start of the novel, we know that Oscar will not have a long life, but I actually found myself waiting with bated breath for his death, as he completes high school, college and takes on a full-time job his life feels less and less brief. Needless to say, there isn't much that can be described as wondrous about his life either. But it isn't quite ironic enough to warrant wondrous as a tongue-in-cheek title adjective. Mind you, the constant references to sci-fi genre works of the past made me feel poorly schooled, I knew nothing of the Lensmen or Watchmen; only the Tolkien and Lewis allusions were comprehensible.

But why did I not mind the equally grandiose titles A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, by Dave Eggers, or album title The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter? Both of these works walk the same line between great and small that TBWLoOW does, and yet they were more affecting and powerful although not much better. I find The Animal Years a much Better Ritter album, and both Eggers and Ritter have received the critical acclaim and word-of-mouth praise that so often ends in disappointment for me. I guess this can just be chalked up the the vagaries of taste and art.